We always talk about how our responses to customer support requests should be more personal and less corporate and boring. But what makes a response personal? It's all about the words you use. This article is about how you can dramatically improve your customer support responses just by using some words over the others.

So, you come into work in the morning, open up your help desk app and see 50 tickets waiting in the queue. How do you go about responding in a most effective way? The obvious way is to handle old issues first — going bottom to top. That's what I was doing for a long time until I realized it's wrong. Oldest issues aren't always the most important ones.

Whatever industry you’re in, you must be getting tons of feature requests from your customers. And there is a wide-spread belief in the tech industry that you should always respond "no" to them. At Jitbit we think that it couldn't be more wrong.

You've already launched your product now it's time to set up a "self-service" help page for your users. Why?

According to Forrester, "72% of customers prefer self-service to resolve their support issues over picking up the phone or sending an email." Our own studies show (we keep an eye on these metrics since we're selling a helpdesk ticketing app) that up to 45% of support issues can be solved without contacting support. Of course it varies throughout specific niches and industries, but on average it's 45%. Which means - almost half of your support burden can be lifted.

TL:DR version when we transferred our domain to NameCheap during the GoDaddy SOPA boycott NameCheap has silently changed our domain's main contact email to "[email protected]" (wtf?), so we were not getting verification emails from ICANN, so ICANN has blocked our domain. Watch out.

Today our domain name ("jitbit.com") went down for nearly 30 minutes. Our website and all our hosted apps, including the hosted version of our help desk ticketing system were inaccessible (our hosted customers access the app using "xxxxx.jitbit.com" URLs). Here's what happened.

As customer support engineers we have to apologize a lot. This is probably what we do most often. When I was just starting out in customer support it was the hardest thing for me to figure out. When a customer is upset, angry or furious — what do you do to make things right? Simply solving the issue was never enough. I was struggling to find the answer for a long time and I think I finally found it - after years of working in customer support and developing a helpdesk ticketing system. The right apology can work magic. An apology is a chance to convert a disappointed customer into a loyal customer if you know how to handle it right.

You probably already know that providing great customer support should be a top priority. What exactly an amazing customer support experience is? Over the years of answering support tickets and developing a helpdesk ticketing system, we figured out what works and what doesn’t and this is my attempt to give a definition of a “great customer support interaction”.